Dusty World – Page 8 – Mechanical Sympathy

A Numbers Game

Can’t say I’m a big fan of Marx, I’m more of a
Leibniz guy, but he’s a useful tool for examining
the blind spots around systemic privilege.

One of the perils of having a degree in philosophy is that it provides you with a wide range of tools for dismantling bureaucratic doubletalk. One of the most dangerous of these tools is Karl Marx. I can’t help but apply Marx’ aggressive economic analysis to any idea being floated as, ‘dismantling systemic prejudice’ in order to parse bureaucratic language couched in privilege. This week in PD this reflex was twinged by how the upcoming destreaming of grade 9 mathematics is being framed in Ontario education.

The way destreaming was portrayed to us (in keeping with current educational value theory) is as anti-racist pedagogy. We were earnestly told that destreaming destigmatizes our students of colour and sets them free from educational oppression.

It helps to live in a rich area that offers
limited access to specialist schools that
don’t admit the proles if you want to science!

I’m no fan of streaming. The myth of STEM and many other educational prejudices are founded on a university focused system being run by academics from that same university system. I was writing STEM curriculum in the spring when the doctor/president of a STEM focused organization dismissed my intent to focus on technology subjects because, “no schools run them, they’re irrelevant.” This academic prejudice made it difficult for me to continue working with a group that casually dismisses all but the streamed super-students they teach at their specialist urban school.

I believe that there is a distinct advantage to running de-streamed classes. The neuro-diversity in an open level class offers all students insight into how people other than themselves think and also offers a qualitative performance advantage when students in groups can leverage many different thinking approaches rather than all following the same (terrifyingly tedious) route to a singular solution. This implies open level classes are at least (if not more) pedagogically rigorous than current, streamed academic classes. Having said all that, my last principal said that my open level classes ‘were too difficult’ and that I ‘should make them easier’ (even though we hadn’t had a failure in years). I’ve never found an open level de-streamed class an excuse to do less. It’s an opportunity for students to escape their intellectual ghettos and understand the world and how to solve it from many perspectives. If only de-streaming were treated as a pedagogical tool rather than a financial one, we’d see real advantages to de-streaming, but the cynic in me suspects that pedagogy isn’t actually the focus of de-streaming.

I teach technology courses and all my classes have been de-streamed forever. Even my ‘M’ level supposedly post-secondary focused senior classes are typically filled with 10-20% essential students and an even split between applied and academic streams (I’m still capped like an academic class at 31 though). What this means is that the system drops high-needs essential students in my class while offering no increase in resources to support these children. In my experience, de-streaming is an excuse to offload more work onto teachers while pulling funding in sections and resources that previously existed.

Ontario’s current push to de-stream grade 9 mathematics is, I believe, a good idea, but I have little faith in the system doing it for the high-falutin equity ideals they claim are motivating them. When equity is used as a marketing tool for financial oppression, no one wins, and when we’re all sitting in larger classes with more diverse, higher-need learners and less resources to help them find their best selves, I can’t help but wonder how the people marketing this can sleep at night.

The current representatives in Ontario government
are taking educational oppression to new heights.

A brutally honest Marxist analysis might look like this:

A school has 20 sections of grade 9 mathematics, 2 essential level, 10 applied level and 8 academic level classes. Essential classes are currently capped at 21 out where I am in order to provide more support for these high-need learners. Applied classes are capped at 23 and academic classes at 31. I imagine you can see where this is going but I’ll take you there anyway.

In our imaginary school this would result in 2 sections for 42 essential students, 10 sections for 230 applied students and 8 sections for 248 academic students. That’s 20 mathematics sections serving 520 students. In our system, open level classes are capped at 27 students, so our 520 students would find themselves in 19 sections once de-streamed, which begs the question: are we doing this to save money or help students find success?

I don’t know what the caps are for these new, de-streamed classes, but if the system ignores its own class caps for open level classes and magically sets the class cap for de-streamed math at 28 or 29 students (changes like this always offer an opportunity to get more for less), suddenly our 520 students are being stuffed into even fewer sections and larger classes, which makes the whole ‘we can decolonialize and produce greater equity in education by destreaming’ angle look a bit disingenuous.

Ontario’s de-streaming is being heavily marketed as an anti-colonial escape from systemic oppression.

It could be, if it isn’t actually cost cutting under an equity marketing banner.

There are genuine benefits to destreaming. Prompting more neuro-diversity in a learning context offers rich alternatives to rote learning catering to the neuro-uniformity prompted by streamed classes. Struggling students are surrounded by peers who can show them better habits and capable students can soak up rich opportunities to mentor while also exploring alternate pathways to solutions. There is also an equity benefit in that everyone is humanized and formerly streamed students are less likely to look down on their peers or turn into teachers who dismiss blue collar subjects out of hand.

These advantages are predicated on de-streaming happening in order to nurture student success, not as the result of hidden financial imperatives designed to cut costs while marketing the whole exercise as the enlightened removal of systemic oppression. If this really is a numbers game then everyone loses, and who loses the most? The kids with less social privilege to begin with.

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Caution, Fear & Risk Aversion in Students

The first ever post on Dusty World from way back in 2010!

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.
Bertrand Russell

… but we don’t set up schools to nurture a love of learning, we set them up like 19th Century factories.

I’m teaching a grade 12 class on computer science. If my computer science teacher knew I was doing this he would roll over in his grave. I haven’t coded since the ’80s, I’m a technician. I got knocked off coding by that same computer science teacher who could only approach coding from a mathematical/logical direction. My hackering/tinkering/non-linear approach to generating code depended on a natural fluency with syntax and a willingness to break things in order to come up with something new. I never cared about solving for x, I was always about the why.

So here I am in a class full of students who my old compsci teacher would have adored: math wizes who have learned how to learn so well that they can’t do anything else.

Lisa Simpson (during a teacher’s strike): I can’t take this anymore! Please, mom! Grade me! Grade me! Validate me!!!

That’s at the bottom of it all. These A students are so trained to the system, so inured, that they can’t possibly get unplugged from the Matrix. The idea of learning for sheer curiosity’s sake has been beaten out of them by a dozen years of positive reinforcement enforced by their spectacularly successful student careers.

When I suggest we take a left turn instead of doing more pointless actionscript programming that no one else on the planet except Ontario Elearning finds valuable and go after C++, which none of them have any experience in, only one is even willing to try it. The rest are paralyzed by fear of failure, or even worse, not being able to demonstrate consistent mastery because that’s how you get that high average. You only get perfect if you’re already ahead of the material. You can’t get low marks at the beginning, continually improve (and actually learn something), and end with an A+. Those early failures that produced learning are considered failures and factored into your grades; we penalize learning in the classroom. There has been some change in this, formative/summative and such, but the vast majority of grading still follows the broken example above. Learning is a non-linear process, experimentation, failure, reassessment, reattempt, fail in a new, more interesting way… but we train students to think it’s an inbuilt ability which you either have or struggle with. How we grade them enforces this.

Even the one student willing to self-direct his learning and take on a challenging new language (one that his university uses extensively and we’re pushing him toward with no experience whatsoever) sent me an email anguishing over his grades if he cannot demonstrate fluency in C++ in the 5 weeks we have left. I’ve approached this a number of ways. Firstly, by working with him to set attainable goals (this still freaks him out, he can’t see the grades for the learning trees in setting the goals to a reasonable level so feels his marks will suffer). Secondly, I’ve gotten him into a course of study that leads him through the beginnings of C++ in a clearly defined and logical fashion. The end result should be a working familiarity with a language he’s never seen before demonstrated by some basic scripts that show him coming to terms with the material. Thirdly, I told him to forget the numbers. He is putting hours in on this, not because he has to but because he wants to. The end result is irrelevant, he is directing his own learning – a dead art in an education system designed to force conformity in order to keep costs down while appearing academically credible. He’s doing something no one else is willing or able to do. He’s also learning something that will immediately assist him in university next year. How is any of this not 100%?

I only wish I could overcome the caution and apathy born of risk aversion in the other students and set them free. We feed them a steady diet of caution then wonder why they aren’t willing to take risks in learning.

I’m not the guardian of knowledge, I shouldn’t even get to decide how they learn, I should do everything I can to ensure that they do though.

Update: I just ran into this student at the Grad ceremony a couple of weeks ago. He’s in his first year at Waterloo U doing computer science (a wickedly difficult course to get into). It was nice to hear that the C++ really payed off in a way that the actionscript stuff never would. He’s finding it difficult, but he’s seeing success, and his greatest advantage? Taking a run at the programming language they use at university before he got there, errors and all.

Project Management as a Fundamental Skillset

Unbeknownst to many in the education sector, project management has grown into a complex academic and applied discipline of study with clearly defined best practices and standards. As technology continues to evolve and offer efficiencies in productivity, it has also prompted a revolution in project management that is becoming a foundational aspect of modern work life, but we don’t teach it.

Last week Alanna and I presented on this foundational collaborative standard from two angles at the well attended ECOOCamp 2021 online Ontario educator’s conference. Alanna’s recent post-graduate course covered project management from an academic/industry angle and my grade 11-12 software engineering class has basically become a project management course as a result of many students having had no contact with it in any other courses. From those two angles we asked the big question, “why aren’t project management best practices taught and used in public education?”

Like many aspects of modern work evolution, project management (PM) best practices aren’t a focus of study in public education. This is a disservice both to students and educators alike. Following project management best practices means you’re not wasting time in meetings that aren’t meetings. If a meeting isn’t predicated on necessary two-way communication in order to reach a consensus, it’s a bad meeting. When was your last staff meeting about two-way/consensus building? Teacher contempt for the the institution of the staff meeting would quickly fade if PM best practices were applied to them.

There are other obvious benefits to public education engaging with PM best practices. If everyone on your staff has a clear idea of what they are responsible for, the timeframes and resources they have to work with, and access to support in order to meet expectations, your in-school projects will be more than an empty checklist and will actually engage and motivate your staff.

From the student angle, applying PM best practices allows for consistent, meaningful assessment of process while also ensuring better outcomes for student led projects. When students graduate they’re able to immediately understand and engage with post-secondary and workplace expectations around collaboration without being surprised by this world-wide literacy they’ve never been exposed to in class. Why project management best practices haven’t been integrated into curriculum across all disciplines is a very good question.

Modern PM leverages digital tools to achieve credible levels of clarity and shared purpose in group work. In our presentation, Alanna leveraged the PM industry awareness she had just developed from her Instructional Design post-graduate course from Royal Roads University. In our presentation Alanna explained Kanban and covered how it grew out of Japanese manufacturing management from the mid-twentieth century. From there we introduced Trello, a virtual Kanban inspired online tool that helps remote groups organize, clarify and assign responsibility though an intuitive and remarkably high-fidelity online interface.

This all came about because, as Alanna was taking her project management course, she was listening to me behind her in our shared office applying PM best practices with my software engineering class. The combination of my applied project management and the academic research Alanna was doing for the course produced the grist for our presentation:

Vague and inconsistent group project expectations
in student collaborative projects result in headaches
for both teachers and students. You owe it to
yourself and your students to engage
with PM best practices!

Teachers and students both struggle with collaboration. From the assessment side, group work, especially without clearly defined guidelines and expectations, can quickly devolve into chaos where work is not even distributed and projects do not reflect collaboration so much as the efforts of one or two key people. That happens to students in classrooms but it also happens in staff management. One of the main benefits of following PM best practices is that group work isn’t an excuse for doing less. Individual accountability is obvious to everyone involved and this leads not only to satisfyingly successful collaborative work but also to an appreciation of your individual best efforts. The students who struggle most in my class with project managements are the ones who have learned that they can Jedi Mind Trick their way through group work and do very little. The leads quickly realize how important it is to clearly communicate consistent expectations and many quieter students in the class thrive because group activity isn’t equated with having a big mouth. There are real benefits to adopting these standards of project management excellence beyond just productivity.

Using PM best practices allows us to tackle complex
technology in groups and produce a rich, engaging
and ultimately successful student directed project
for a wider variety of students.

In our software engineering course students begin grade 11 by training in Unity game development and Blender 3d modelling. These challenging technical skills were (I thought) the biggest hurdles, but it turns out they weren’t at all. We’re at the point now where the grade 12s teach the technical training in only a couple of weeks and then support junior students in a live software development environment. Students are able to produce complex, genuine software engineering and digital creativity with our process. For the students committed to developing these high-demand skills, our technical training gets them there efficiently and supportively.

The big struggle turned out to be getting high school students to recognize why their project management strategies weren’t working and providing guidance and tools that would support best project management practices which most were unaware of. When we looked at how group projects are developed in other classes, we found a wide range of approaches ranging from almost completely lacking in any organization or credibility to rote, restrictive, step-by-step strategies that offered no genuine management control by students and stifled creativity and self direction. We couldn’t find any other courses following industry standard project management and I struggled to find any on the staff side of the equation either.

Engaging with PM best practices and then giving your students the guidance and tools needed to successfully work together on collaborative projects is an individually empowering step that will help students not only in school, but when they graduate too. I’ve had university students return and say that my open level technology course did more to prepare them for challenging university project work than any ‘U’ level class they took. I’ve had college and apprenticeship students return with the same insight. In case you think this doesn’t apply to workplace students, I’ve had them return saying that this experience has gotten them jobs and helped them find promotion once employed. This really is a 21st Century fluency we’ve missed.

If PM best practices started in classrooms, I’d hope at some point that they would begin to infect educational management as well. I had a former department head tell me that she diligently kept receipts for the first couple of years of managing her department budget but eventually let it slide because the budgets they were operating under were frequently adjusted in the murky world of public sector accounting. I’ve frequently been asked to do project work within the system where we are given no clear budget, timeline or even specific outcomes. This kind of vagary produces frustration and disengagement in staff and students alike. PM best practices not only result in greater individual engagement and positive morale, they also let you get stuff done fairly and effectively.

We had a great crowd at ECOOcamp and now we’re going to aim the presentation at the Ontario Library Association super-conference. If we can engage teachers to adopt PM best practices, their students will benefit in many ways. If we can reach a critical mass in aligning public education with PM best practices, we could revolutionize the bureaucratically obscure system we’re all living under and produce happier, more engaged staff who produce more efficient and effective projects. I don’t enjoy the disengaged, sardonic staff thing that happens in education. If we could all believe in the system it would make for a more pedagogically meaningful working environment for all. It just takes some transparency and clarity to achieve.

The benefits of digital tools aligned with PM best practices also promises to raise the engagement and effectiveness of your online classroom. With everyone on the same page in terms of expectations, and with rich online tools like Trello to intuitively interface with what’s happening in group work, rich, meaningful learning can happen collaboratively, even in a remote setting. In a digitally powered face to face classroom tools like Trello can keep students organized and focused on their specific tasks and responsibilities, leading to greater student project success. Because the collaboration is transparent and meaningful it is also a genuine learning opportunity because each student’s actions have a credible impact on the outcome.

Here’s hoping project management best practices and professional understandings can find their way into our public education system sooner than later.

ONLINE PROJECT MANAGEMENT RESOURCES

The presentation slide deck:

The Project Management Institute

https://www.pmi.org/

“Project Management Institute (PMI) is the world’s leading professional association for a growing community of millions of project professionals and changemakers worldwide.”

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the end of comments in a flattening media-hierarchy

Oh, the incivility!

Recently the Toronto Star turned off online comments on their website. I beat them to it by about a year. I was recently asked why I would do that. Don’t I want people to interact with my online content?

I sure do! And if they want to they can share my blog and then comment on it to their heart’s content. What do I possibly get out of running a comments section on a blog? Nothing! If you ask for a login no one bothers to do it, if you allow open, anonymous comments you get buried in advertising and nastiness, the typical by-products of human interaction.

With the advent of pervasive social media the idea of needing a comments section within your online content has had its day. Anyone reading online content has their own social media presence of some sort nowadays. They are more than welcome to leverage that in order to comment on my content. In doing so they share my content. It’s the least they can do if it prompted them to have an opinion on it that they want to share.

We’ve moved from stratified, traditional, paper based media delivery though early adopter online media delivery to a more mature, everyone-has-a-presence-online media delivery system (nicely explained in this essay lambasting education’s inability to free the essay from its millennium of bondage). Embedded comment sections are a hold-over from an earlier internet where online readers tended not to have their own online presence.

Digital technology is forcing an increasingly flat media-scape. Millennials spend almost no time in traditional media. They could barely pay attention to Star Wars in the theatre when I was there last week. I’ve stopped showing videos in class because asking Millennials to watch media simultaneously is alien to them and frustrating for me. In a world where people distrust and often ignore the patronizing nature of traditional media it’s best not to fight the flow.

If you’re determined to hang on to the comment section in your online content you’re swimming against the current. You’re assuming that your content is somehow more established, more authentic, more valuable. You are belittling your visitors’ online presence by making them work in yours. It’s ultimately about you refusing to surrender control of your content in an increasingly democratic communication medium. That idea of control is a holdover from traditional, paper-based media hierarchies, it isn’t surprising that a newspaper struggled with this. You’ve got to let it all go Neo.

If you want insipid examples of human nastiness and stupidity you’ll find them online, especially in anonymous, internal comment sections. I’d long stopped reading The Star’s comment section for this very reason. I also tend to blacklist those brave (often conservative) souls on twitter and other social media who hide behind anonymous or fake user names. They feel very brave and are usually overly aggressive in their anonymity.

What’s funnier are those people who create social media presences based on their real self and then proceed to advertise their ignorance to the world. If someone is going to confuse Twitter with texting there isn’t much we can do for their employment prospects. People who are nasty online tend to get bitten though. It’s a self correcting process and it’s happening less and less because we’re getting better at it.

This flattening media-scape isn’t just hurting traditional media, it’s also snapping at people who don’t realize that their reach has changed. Democratizing media means empowering people who have no experience with publication, and make no mistake, every time you post on social media you’re publishing to the entire planet. People in Timbuktu can read your tweets if they are so inclined.

There will come a point when there have been enough cautionary tales and social experience with self-publication that people will learn best practices and the vast majority will realize just how empowered and potentially dangerous we’ve all become in our flat new world.

In the meantime, if people want to comment on my content they’re welcome to share away, but I’m not providing a comments section because it belittles my reader’s own online presence and dilutes my material with mean and often irrelevant comments.

Part 1: Magical Technologists

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Arthur C. Clarke

I’m reading Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near, and in the opening he compares computer programs to Harry Potter’s magical spells. It seemed spurious when I read it, but now I’m wondering how it looks from other eyes.

I’m the go-to tech guy at school, and I dig the position. I’ve joked before about how people need to sacrifice a chicken (or just wave a rubber one over the computer) if they want something to work, but now the metaphor is resolving a bit more.

Today our soon to retire head of guidance came in all worked up because he couldn’t take a document and put it in his powerpoint. He was using and old, hobbled, board laptop with an ancient copy of, well, everything on it; it was state of the art in 2002 when he got it.

I copied his (wordpad!) file onto a USB key, opened it on my competent, not-board computer (it actually uses Windows 7 instead of XP – the ONLY OS of choice for our board) and MS Office instead of Wordperfect. I opened the DOC in Office (which just works, unlike Wordperfect on the board laptop) and then screen grabbed the guidance material he wanted into two jpegs. I then copied them onto the USB and moved them back over to his sad, old laptop. In moments I had one of the jpegs filling a slide on his powerpoint. After I did the first one, I got him to do the second one. He was happy, it all worked, and he even had some idea of how to put jpegs into powerpoint too.

Looking at the order of operations above, it looks pedantic and pretty this/then/that to me, but many people reading it would get lost in the acronyms or the logical sequence of it. It assumes an understanding of what works with what and how to bypass difficulties around software not cooperating, among other things.

From another point of view, it might look like I pulled out my own, newer, better wand (laptop), and made some arcane gestures (trackpad), spoke some gobbledigook (tech-talk) and dropped a regent into the spell (the USB key). and made what seemed impossible possible. Without comfort level, experience and equipment, it looks like I made something happen out of nothing.

The councilor with him said I was the secret technical mystic they turned to when things just didn’t work.

I try to be transparent with what I’m doing, and explain it to people as I’m doing it, but I see their eyes glaze over when I use the first acronym and then they just sit there with a happy smile on their face as the issue gets resolved. I’d like for everyone to be able to cast their own spells, but I fear many would rather just applaud the magician.

Which takes me back to Harry again. There’s a scene where Dumbledore escapes from the evil Ministry in spectacular fashion. He could have just disappeared, but he doesn’t, he does it with a flourish. Kingsly the auror says afterwards, “Dumbledore may be a criminal, but you’ve got to admit, he has style!”

If you’re going to be a tech-magician, and if you’re reading this you probably already are, then don’t cast your spells flat, be like Dumbledore, have some style!

Part 2: Digital Horcruxes

Staring Into The Abyss

Originally published on Dusty World in October, 2012:

I was just reading Doug Peterson’s Blog about how a number of edublogs are looking at the Amanda Todd story. I can understand the urge, but I’m coming at this from a different angle than most.

I’ve had a particularly difficult year dealing with suicide. In September I received an email from the coroner with a PDF attached. In many pages of astonishing detail I read the science that showed that my Mum’s death wasn’t an accident, that she took her own life. When you’re staring into an abyss like this the rhetoric currently in the media sounds astoundingly shallow. Suicide isn’t a rational choice, or even an emotional one, it’s an existential choice, the most profound one imaginable.

To pin an action like this on a single motivation (ie: cyber bullying so you can amp up anxiety around technology use with children) is simplistic and manipulative. I have no doubt that cyber bullying played a part, but to base suicide on a single motivating factor is asinine and seems more in line with pushing a political agenda than recognizing a complex truth.

When I was in high school I was big into Dungeons and Dragons. At the height of the hobby a kid in Orangeville killed themselves and the press gleefully pinned the cause on D&D, causing panic in parents and making me, as an avid player, feel isolated and vilified. They’d done something similar a few years earlier with Ozzy Osborne and another suicide. This kind of simplification fills up the reports of the chattering classes, and helps idiots create fictions that let them push agendas. That many in the public swallow it is a lasting sadness.

From an educator’s point of view, this is being treated as a management issue. I fear suicide is being used to manipulate cyber bullying as a political tool – which under my circumstances seems particularly callous. Rhetorical stances like ‘suicide is never an option’ and rationalizations abound in an attempt to direct this very difficult aspect of human behavior. Control is the goal, based on a very real fear of the outcome. But the rhetoric still comes on in response to the presses’ assertion that cyber bullying caused this death.

I’ve been staring into this abyss for a while now. It has made work difficult, it has made life seem like the self made experience that it is, which is exceedingly heavy if you’re like most people and happy with distractions and assumption as your reason for being. Nothing is inherently valuable, life is what we make it – literally. In my Mum’s case she was battling mental illness and was finally on medication for it – which she overdosed on. Did mental illness play a part in her death? No doubt. Was it the only cause? Not remotely.

The suicide I’m dealing with didn’t happen in a vacuum, I suspect none of them do. I also suspect that none of them has ever, ever happened for a single reason. There is no doubt that Amanda was bullied, and that this was a factor in her suicide. What I question are the responses that focus on dealing with a single social issue that has always and will always exist as though resolving it would somehow magically have prevented her death.

People are naturally social and competitive. Bullying is a result of this basic human nature, it always has been. The twist now is that many of the clueless digital natives are publishing what has always happened privately for everyone to see. Instead of being seen as a window to a previously hidden behavior, the media has dubbed this a cyber bullying epidemic and called into question the very technologies that have made a problem as old as humanity obvious.

The educational response has been to try and get out in front of this invented epidemic. As someone who has circled this abyss, I’d ask everyone involved in education to consider the situation from more than a single perspective. Please do not simplify suicide into a misunderstanding that can be rationalized away.

We are not serving our students well if we simplify this into an administrative exercise solely to reduce suicide numbers. Appreciate the complexities of suicide and try to see the people who end up in this darkness as whole people with many interconnected, complex issues, and not something to be convinced, coerced, manipulated or managed into doing what is more comfortable for everyone else.

Suicide is complex, terrifying and present. It deserves our full attention, not a soundbite.

Art Therapy.

Tablets are like high heels part 2

The original: Tablets are like high heels

A while back I tried to wrap my head around tablets and why they are so popular. I struggled using an original ipad and eventually gave up. A bit later I had an opportunity to use a windows tablet and almost broke it across my head in frustration. I’m a tech savvy type, so I kept at it. If tablets are so great, what wasn’t I getting?

This past year I got my hands on an Asus Transformer – the tablet that would convince me that tablets are handy (because it also comes with a keyboard). It only convinced me that Android has a long way to go in being a tablet OS.

I’ve got an ipad2 and the Asus Transformer floating around my department waiting for robotics to start, so I offered them out to my staff for test drives. 18 emails requesting the slower, lower memory, single tasking ipad, one saying either would be fine (he got the quad core multi tasking Asus). Marketing works. Perhaps that is the key to tablet success.

The sell on tablets is a hard one. You’re getting epic style (yes, Picard has epic style) along with interweb access. I want to be peppy, mobile and look like I come from the future! I want a tablet, right?

Turns out I don’t. After trying and trying to tablet up, it just isn’t sticking. It appears I’m at an impasse when it comes to tablets and how I use the internet.

When I go online it’s a full contact sport. I like to get into many things simultaneously (that knocks the ipad out), I’m constantly taking pictures from one thing and slapping them into another. I’m in and out of photoshop, dreamweaver and other processor heavy software, I want lightning fast responses, the ability to create media on the fly, a keyboard that rewards me for years of learning how to touch type, and a screen that offers a clear view of as many full colour pixels as I can lay my eyes on.

Keep your filthy touch screens!
I want no part of it!

I expect to be able to toss something I found online onto my twitter feed or Facebook or linkedin, or flickr or evernote, or Ning, or Edmodo or any of a million other online tools without having to wonder if it’ll copy and paste this time or not.

Touch screens drive me bonkers. Until I’m getting Iron Man like performance from my 3d touch interface, I’m not interested in taking stabs at data to see if I can pick them up over and over again. Watching people do this on tablet baffles me, they seem content to have to attempt the same action over and over again, resigned to it – the inefficiency drives me batty. The fact that you look like a lost mole looking for a hole makes me snort in derision!

Then there’s the screen itself. I’m the kind of guy who cleans the windscreen in his car often (or his glasses before he got the lasers). If I have to look through it, I want it pristine. Peanut butter encrusted high def screens hold no interest for me at all. Even a plain old finger print smudge makes me wonder why you’d pay for the high-def screen in the first place. I’m a visual person, I want my digital window to gleam.

Tablets are for people who like to watch, spectators. If you are a passive web media consumer, I’d suggest going back to TV, but if you’re determined to lurk, tablets are a good fit for you. You look nice, but can’t do much; we’re back to the high heels again.

If you’re an active web user, someone who produces (and by produce I mean generate media, not merely be a retweeting machine) as much as they consume, then you’re going to find that the all show

Geeky high heels.

and no go reality of tablets frustrating.

There is no single moment where I’ve wished for a tablet when I’ve had my ultrabook handy. Light, fast and fully capable, and running on a full/real operating system instead of the dumbed down mobile OSes on tablets; that is where my proclivities lie!

If I have to have a tablet at all, it’s a phone and it fits in my pocket. It has a good camera, can get me online in a pinch, the batteries last all day and it doesn’t run so slowly as to drive me around the bend. I’ll live with the lame mobile OS until they get better and it’ll do everything I’d ever need a tablet for without spending hundreds of dollars on a redundancy.

At any other point, when I really want to hit the web, I’ll turn to the laptop.

Tablets might be a good fit for how you go online if you’re a freaky lurker, but otherwise stay clear! You’ll look great using them, but you won’t actually be doing much. If that’s your M.O., an Apple genius is waiting to take your order.

Recognizing Your Own Accomplishments

I’ve written a number of negative end-of-year reflections on this absurd year of teaching and not shared them because swimming in those waters is poisonous. I’m glad I was able to write and reflect them out of me though. They’re hanging in the blogger draft space and I might just let them loose one day in the future when the idiocy of this past year is a distant memory. I think it’s important to critically assess everything that went wrong in this human disaster in the hopes that it won’t happen again.

On Friday I attended a webinar put on by a group of professional creatives that focused on recognizing your own accomplishments. This group formed to look at ways of maintaining creative output for a living. This isn’t something most people have to worry about since their jobs are quite prescribed. For too many teachers their teaching is prescribed but I’ve never been a fan of that approach. For me teaching is a creative, never-rote activity and talking to professional musicians and visual artists helps me find the capacity to teach in the ever-evolving way that I want to.

I struggle with public acknowledgement of accomplishments. I don’t do what I do for accolades and I prefer to step out of the way and let students take the limelight. As long as I’m able to find the resources we need to be successful then I couldn’t care less about acknowledgement, except acknowledgement is frequently a mechanism that has brought us the resources we need to succeed so dismissing it out of hand isn’t sensible.

In listening to the artists in this webinar talk about their wins, I still struggled with the idea that this just sounds like tooting your own horn. Creative output, for me at least, always comes with a healthy dose of humility. Having crushed any rose-coloured glasses I’m able to get on with the difficult job of creation without any delusions, but this isn’t very marketable and marketing kept cropping up in discussion. Does creativity have to include suffering? Can you be clear eyed about your creativity or is being creative inherently delusional?

The other side to this harshness in terms of metacognitively accepting and being able to speak productively about accomplishments is that not being able to recognize your accomplishments can hurt you psychologically and ultimately make you uncreative and unproductive. If you fall into a depression over abuse or unfairness then you won’t be able to do what you do. Striking a balance with recognition of accomplishments is both a personal mental health and a being a functional creative issue.

From any rational point of view I should be viewing this past year as a towering success in my career. My students fought their way to two places in the national finals of the CyberTitan Canadian National Student Cybersecurity Competition and both overcame all sorts of adversity in order to produce our best results ever. Being top ten twice out of over 150 teams should be something we acknowledge positively.

Over in Skills Ontario we did backflips to keep student competitors engaged and although we had one competition drop out, the others performed exceptionally well. We’d only ever won medals in IT & Networking previously but we didn’t just keep our string of IT medals going for a fifth consecutive year, we also won our first provincial medals in electronics, coding and GIS as well. That too deserves positive reflection that encourages future attempts.

Meanwhile, from a classroom teaching perspective, we managed to retain very high engagement rates in this rudderless year of hybrid simultaneous face to face and remote or fully remote learning. Even in the final quadmester our fully-remote (again) and exhausted game-development students produced fantastic examples of what digitally fluent Ontario high school students are capable of. We also punched through to new heights in terms of student achievement while also saving those that were drowning in the sea of systemic failure. I couldn’t see that though because what we were doing was only ever a fraction of what we normally do in a school year.

As a teacher I suddenly found myself being put up for awards and winning them. NCWIT not only awarded two of our graduating women in technology their provincial award but also acknowledged me as a 2021 educator of the year for supporting girls in technology and engineering. Then my board gave me an Everyday Hero Award and OTIP let me know I was an honourable mention in their provincial teacher award. These are the hardest for me to talk about because my reflex is to step back and let students take the accolades, but the support of parents and students in writing those applications means the world to me so ignoring them is neither appropriate nor appreciative.

I’ve been unable to give these things the positive reflection they deserve because of the cruel year we’ve just been dragged through. Next year doesn’t look much better with the same sabotaging political mismanagement in an education system paralyzed by our own political failures, but if I let the good things fade into the malaise from all these elements beyond my control then I’m lost.

I’ve put down several extra jobs this summer in order to find my mojo again. I can’t go back into the classroom having lost all hope in the credibility of our education system. If I can get my feet under me again I can stand up and fight for what matters for another year.

When the education system fell apart around me and work became frustration piled on frustration I found a creative outlet to release myself through. Starting last fall I was up at 4am every morning when work anxiety wasn’t letting me sleep writing and I’m now 160,000+ words into a novel that I never thought I’d find the time to write.

I’m energized by teaching because it lets me pour my efforts into something that is difficult, important and credible, ideally while being surrounded by people doing the same meaningful work without pretense. With credibility circling the drain this year and pretense the new normal, I needed to do something real that wouldn’t take anything other than my best effort.

I prefer to put my energy into something I believe in and that appreciates and respects that commitment. When I couldn’t find that at school I did what I could to help and refocused my energy on this creative writing project that had no room for pretense. Should anyone ever read the book I think they will find the frustrations of the last year written into it large. France’s collapse in 1940 against the German Blitzkrieg has many parallels with Ontario’s approach to COVID19 in the past year.

Dusty World is going on hiatus for the summer and I’m going to focus on finishing the novel. Now that I’ve gotten this negativity out of me I don’t need to carry it any more and I’m putting down teaching at least until the ECOO Conference in August because even in a year when I’ve lost faith in education I still can’t help but go above and beyond and start my school year weeks early in hopes of making it better for everyone.

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Hiding History Behind Politics

History isn’t just an informational subject, it’s also very much about critical media literacy. Trying to get a clear view of history through what’s left to us is nearly impossible because human beings will immediately want to spin it for their own benefit. These prejudices come from the people at the time, the people who decided what survives and the people in charge now. This propagandist approach has a great deal of power when applied to the study of national history because it produces dangerous byproducts, like patriotism based on national myths that systemically exclude whole swaths of our society.

This is the cover of Flashback Canada, the history book they handed me to teach a grade 8 class during my teaching practicum in Peel in 2003. I wasn’t a Canadian citizen when this piece of propaganda was handed to me and I was told, as an agent of the system, to indoctrinate the class (most of whom were also new Canadians) with this violently untrue rendition of Canadian Federation.

I can’t find the full illustration from inside the book (it’s a two page spread!) but I recall it had indigenous groups in traditional garb, unaccompanied women and many BIPOC characters fictionally back-written into the narrative of a multi-cultural Canadian history that never happened. Teaching this “we’ve always been multi-cultural” myth of Canada made me very uncomfortable so instead of teaching the text I found some other historical images of Confederation done close to the time and then the students and I looked at the differences between the textbook’s rendition and other historical documents. As you might have guessed, Canadian Confederation in 1867 was a lot of white dudes (because they were the only people considered as people under the law – no one else could vote or politically mattered):

How did this play with a lively, very multi-cultural class of grade 8s in 2003? Code-switching wasn’t a common term back then but many of the BIPOC students talked about how stuff like this makes them doubt their own experiences with racism in Canada. This made my older, white Canadian supervising teacher uncomfortable. These days I’m sure she would be on board with the current ‘woke’ white settler types who want to make make a lot of noise in this moment that will quickly fade to leave us with our lousy status quo again. Dwelling in the discomfort by prompting discussion and then making systemic change as a result is a way to move beyond our reflexive need to retain a status quo built on lies.

I’ve talked about historical prejudice before on Dusty World but the events currently happening in Canada are bubbling it all to the surface again, though I don’t understand why anyone is so surprised by them. These children disappeared in plain sight and reports of the nastiness of religious residential schools aren’t new. Choosing to be surprised by them now feels like political spin. Part of that latest push is to cancel Canada Day but this politically divisive move only shames anyone who disagrees while amplifying the voices of those who want to leverage this disaster for their own political ends.

I’ve heard (smart, historically aware) people advocate for cancelling Canada Day because aboriginal families are mourning the recent discovery of thousands of children’s graves from the Canadian religious residential school genocide, but the only people reeling from this ‘discovery’ are politicized left-wing Canadians who have now decided to (loudly) acknowledge this hiding-in-plain-sight colonial history. I doubt native families are ‘stunned’ by these ‘findings’ as they’ve been living them for generations. This ‘white surprise’ must seem disingenuous.

I’m left wondering if children’s history text books are still as multi-culturally white-washed as that one I was handed in 2003. My approach to that lesson caused friction with my (white, established-settler Canadian) teacher-mentor. Teaching rote curriculum out of prejudiced texts works much like taking down statues and cancelling holidays: it’s an effective way to revise historical fact to suit the current political narrative which is itself a nasty piece of work.

In the next two centuries the selfish decisions made by current generations around rampant overpopulation, wasteful consumption of resources and pollution of our limited ecosystem will make any previous genocides look tame, yet we’re quick to burn anything historical that doesn’t meet our myopic ethics. That well-travelled, carbon spewing first-worlders who hop into their 4×4 SUVs wearing sweatshop made clothing are so loudly self righteous is another example of temporal prejudice, but then you don’t see a lot of humility or self-awareness in history.

It’s easy to criticize previous generations without making any attempt to contextualize their decisions in the time that they were made. This temporal prejudice is every bit as corrosive as racial or gender prejudice. Mass consumers waving social justice flags while making decisions that will kill billions in the future are just as blind to their own contextual short-comings. Wouldn’t it be something if everyone tried to overcome the pomp and circumstance of history with humility, honesty and fairness?

Cancelling holidays that are guaranteed for you but not for others at the rough end of the socio-economic spectrum reeks of privilege, while taking down statues and renaming things is more about rewriting history to make it less uncomfortable than it is about making any genuine systemic change. What we should be doing is legally deconstructing confederation and taking the colonial prejudices out of Canada’s political structure. First past the post British electoral systems prop up old prejudices and should be dismantled but won’t because party ‘representatives’ that could make the changes won’t because the status quo is what handed them power.

The nastiness of Canadian colonial history isn’t easy to stomach but throwing a cancellation blanket over it isn’t going to solve anything; we need to dwell in this discomfort if it’s ever to prompt real systemic change. Politically driven divisive ideas like cancelling national holidays and renaming everything to make it less offensive is more likely to support the status quo than change it. We’ll never overcome historically prejudiced propaganda by spinning more of it. Real change has to happen at the legal level or we’ll just keep spinning lies to maintain this poisonous politically charged status quo.

RESOURCES

https://blogs.umass.edu/linguist/secret-path-residential-schools-reconciliation/

“Come learn about indigenous people’s history that you probably weren’t taught in school…”

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/first-nations-right-to-vote-granted-50-years-ago-1.899354

First nations Canadians didn’t get the vote until 1960! Canada’s concept of representative democracy has always been flawed and yet it’s treated as sacred – which is how you ensure that status quo continues. These days the old white guys in charge casually dismiss the Charter of Rights whenever it suits them.

https://www.cbc.ca/kidscbc2/the-feed/why-it-took-so-long-for-women-to-get-to-vote-in-canada

“…in September 1917, the Wartime Elections Act was passed in Canada. It granted the vote to women in the military and women who had male relatives fighting in World War I, but it also stripped away voting rights from many Canadians who immigrated from ‘enemy’ countries.”

https://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/chinese-canadians-get-the-vote-in-1947

Asian Canadians didn’t get to vote in Canada until after WW2!

https://humanrights.ca/story/the-chaotic-story-of-the-right-to-vote-in-canada

“The story of the right to vote in Canada is the story of a centuries‐long struggle to extend democratic rights to all citizens. It’s a chaotic tale that includes rebellions and riots, as well as protests, and visits to the Supreme Court of Canada.”

https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/confederation

“Indigenous peoples were not invited to or represented at the Charlottetown and Quebec Conferences. This despite the fact they had established what they believed to be bilateral (nation-to-nation) relationships and commitments with the Crown through historic treaties. (See also: Treaties with Indigenous Peoples in Canada; Royal Proclamation of 1763.) The Fathers of Confederation, however, held dismissive, paternalistic views of Indigenous peoples. As a result, Canada’s first peoples were excluded from formal discussions about unifying the country.”

You won’t find anyone on the Canadian Encyclopedia page who isn’t an old white dude because they are the ones that confederated Canada, specifically while denying anyone who wasn’t from their background any participation. Re-writing history to ignore what actually happened isn’t a great way of learning from those mistakes.

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Equity Theatre, Safety Theatre, COVID19 Theatre: The Appearance of Caring

Wired had an insightful piece on diversity theatre in a recent issue that exposes the organizational lie behind equity programs trotted out by management to give the appearance of caring about current social issues.

“Diversity theater creates a sense of dissonance: Workers have to represent the company publicly while feeling victimized by it privately; they must identify shortcomings but are punished for acting on them.”

The frustation felt by people of colour who take on equity management roles only to discover that they aren’t allowed to be critical of anything their employer does casts a harsh light on the game of appearing to care as a marketing promotion. Actually caring and the systemic change it would prompt is something most organizations are unable or unwilling to do because most organizations exist as a result of some very one sided history, and no one is willing to hand back their systemic privalege.

This isn’t just as private company gambit, public services are in the same boat. Governments formed on the back of economic imperialism aren’t willing to move from that position of privalege and dominance. The primarily white, heteronomative, neurotypicals who roost in organizational management positions are more than happy to spend a pitance on theatrical appearances but would never risk their privaleged positions by pushing for true institutional change.

One of the thrills (for me at least though many others don’t seem to be feeling it) in teaching is helping a student in less than ideal circumstances rise above their socio-economic station and get onto a pathway that best reflects their potential. In the past year I’ve seen the public educaiton system in Ontario, already under attack from a hostile government, convulse under the weight of a mismanaged health emergency. The people to blame for this exist at the highest levels of government and, in this particular government’s case, have been ushered in to office by a misled electorate who have given them the power to deconstruct the few remaining equity processes in our public education system. When they couldn’t force the system to throw its least privaleged students under the bus, they simply leveraged a pandemic to do it for them; and the political organizations standing against them in public education capitulated in a panic.

I’m not so sure that it did any more. COVID has been the hammer Ford wished for – everyone else in education has been outsmarted by the virus but Ford seems to be leveraging it.

Theatre is a great way to hammer home inequity while appearing to care. COVID theatre is the current weapon of choice. I just learned that we are doing quadmesters again in the fall. It won’t matter that all staff and most students will be vaccinated by then, it’s easier to look like you care by throwing a radically inequitable schedule at students and staff and then sitting back to watch it mulch them, all the time saying that it shows how much you care about their safety.

We’re facing an unprecidented number of failures in school this year. I have strong students who have simply given up and fallen silent, and my heart is broken for them. I’m willing to bet these students in particular are in the middle of family economic crises with parents laid off due to the pandemic, and/or the loss of family members, and/or depression from the lack of genuine social contact for over a year now. Even with all that happening, I’m hearing from even the strongest students that they are being run into the ground by twelve plus hours a day of maths work as teachers desperately try to jam 110 hours of complex instruction through the key-hole of emergency remote learning in wildly inequitable situations. STEM is for the rich and privaleged who have the time and space to keep up with the workload.

Many parents of students with IEPs have told me of the crisis their children are experiencing at the hands of a system determined to play the COVID-theatre of business-as-usual in education. Watching (usually young, energetic teachers looking for contract sections) pipe up about how there are real advantages to quadmestered teaching is laughable, but one of the best ways to get into a system is to help it support its myths. This slight of hand is heartbreaking and deeply personal because I’m a parent of a student with special needs. When your child’s IEP specifically states they need extra time to work on material and you see teacher after teacher running them off the treadmill of quadmestered/reduced time/accelerated learning, you have to wonder where everyone’s heads are at. Compassion should lie at the heart of equity but it seems that compassion is in short supply over a year into this pandemic.

Last spring we magically passed everyone even though the system lurched into fully remote emergency learning completely unprepared. After being run through face to face learning only to be pulled out again and again this year when school driven pandemic spread was proven to be the engine driving our provincial disaster, the validity of ‘credits’ in the 2020/21 school year is, at best, questionable.

Even when we were face to face (in masks, distanced) students were still expected to spend half of their course learning remotely. The other half had them in barely functioning face to face cohorts where they were being taught in madly restricted classrooms by exhausted teachers trying to be in two places at once. In the insane year I’m just staggering to the end of I never once had a covering teacher, either online or in person, who was qualified to teach my subject. I never once even had a technology teacher covering me in live classes so that students could keep using tools and equipment in what little face to face instructional time they did have.

Quadmestered face to face teaching meant two 2.5 hour continuous instructional periods everyday where, if I had to duck out to use the washroom, I was putting my students at risk leaving them with a teacher (sometimes they weren’t even teachers) who were unqualified to monitor safety in the room. Safety-theatre is another one of these smoke and mirror games organizations like to play where (as long as it doesn’t mean any extra work for them) they’ll put you in a position where you’ll do extra to keep things working to the point of hurting yourself, like I did this year.

Each of those 2.5 hour face to face instructional periods without qualified relief wasn’t the only ball I was juggling. Simultaneously I was also setting up remote learning and monitoring that, because every teacher I was partnered with was unqualified to teach my subject area and usually took that opportunity to fade away and leave me trying to be in two places at once. Students in my current remote class don’t know who our elearning support teacher is because they’ve never seen her. Multiple calls to my union was met with silence and I’ve since stepped back from the position of CBC rep because I’m not sure I actually have a union anymore.

Theatre runs thick in our union too. This spring at AMPA, the yearly provinical gathering of regional representatives, members of colour were kicked out of the online event for having virtual avatars on their accounts that upset the always-white provinical management. White supremacy, as described on those avatars, wasn’t an over the top suggestion but it hurt the feelings of the delicate white people in charge and so they banned those members of colour. We’ve since had it explained to us (multiple times by old white people in charge) that those members broke the parlimentary rules everyone agreed to abide by and that’s why they were removed. They then voted in another white president, though it is a woman and we’ve only had two of those in a century, so little steps. The woman of colour who could lead us into a more equitable future was convulsed out of contention as this old Canadian organization does what old Canadian organizations do best: cling to colonial prejudices when it best suits the people running them.

In reference to the attempts to address systemic racism in one of the biggest boards in the proivnce, a member of colour said they felt like OSSTF provincial was weaponizing our own consitution against us. I’ve been seeing that side of OSSTF since 2012. Maybe one day we’ll put aside the equity theatre and actually be equitable. Any mention of this online whips senior (white) union management into a, “you’re a union basher!” stance. I can assure you I am not, but I’m no fan of the status quo and they shouldn’t be either. Instead of weaponizing an archaic paliamentary system that keeps the status quo intact, perhaps we should be looking for ways to rejig the system so it’s actually more equitable and representative of all members. That isn’t just something my union should do, it’s something our not-so-representative Canadian governments should do too.

The hair-trigger decision to go with quadmestered classes in the fall even though we’re not sure where we’ll be by then and case numbers continue to fall even as the province opens up thanks to a vaccination system that is finally working is, at best, short-sighted. It plays the COVID theatre game by showing how serious everyone is about safety while ignoring the gross inequities of quadmestered scheduling. It also happens to reuse all the planning done last year but I’m sure that easy way out wasn’t what prompted the decision. Someone decided that students with special needs or the ones under durress at home can burn for another inequitable, unsustainable quadmestered school year for valid, pedagogical reasons, I’m sure.

Meanwhile, front line workers will get dunked into another year of unsustainable and inequitable work overload. Attempting to be in two places at once (for me at least, for many teachers with smaller classes it’s an easier ride) is absolutely harrowing. COVID theatre will also demand that everyone wear masks in a one-size-fits-all organization in poorly ventilated rooms not because vaccinations don’t work (they do), but because it’s important to look like we care.

We’ll probably have a lot of well-meaning (is it well-meaning if it’s theatre?) equity PD again this year even as we roll out a schedule that (once again) systemically attacks students with special needs or who lack the privalege needed to effectively leverage remote learning. It’ll once again be left to individuals on the front lines to make up for this systemic failure by trying to bridge the pedgagocial gaps we’ve opened up. The theatre of cruelty isn’t over yet.